We are studying vulnerability to schizophrenia, affective disorder, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse. Our goals are to identify childhood precursor patterns and environmental factors that are predictive of psychopathology and substance abuse, and to explore the temporal sequences and pathways through which these precursors develop. Our longitudinal sample (assessed on at least two occasions) consists of 231 families and 583 children, including 80 children with a schizophrenic parent, 154 children with a unipolar parent, 134 children with a bipolar parent, 39 children with an alcoholic parent, and 176 normal control children. We are now following up the over age-18 offspring who had been assessed by us during childhood. Our data include measures of: 1) psychological functioning of the parents; 2) the environment, including family functioning, marital adjustment, parenting practices, and life stress; 3) children's social, cognitive, and personal competence, including peer, teacher, parent, and self-ratings; 4) early signs or precursors to the development of schizophrenia, affective disorder or substance abuse, including cognitive slippage, attentional deficits, hedonic capacity, depressogenic attributional styles, and subsyndromal affective patterns. Our goal are to: 1) obtain a detailed picture of the characteristics of children with a parent diagnosed as schizophrenic, affectively ill, or alcoholic; 2) relate child characteristics to parental diagnosis and environmental variables; 3) identify particularly vulnerable and invulnerable children; 4) assess the ways in which the child and family are affected by the stresses of parental disorder; and 5) identify precursors to psychopathology and substance abuse.
| Weintraub, S A (1990) Children and adolescents at risk for substance abuse and psychopathology. Int J Addict 25:481-94 |
